US security agencies were "insufficiently aggressive" in pursuing
leads on the Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, President Obama will
be told in an official report into the attempted terrorist attack on
Christmas Day.

The CIA and other agencies failed to chase up leads on the Detroit bomber, a report will sayPhoto: REUTERS

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

2:29PM GMT 31 Dec 2009

Intelligence agencies including the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) also failed to share key information about the would-be suicide bomber which could have prevented him boarding the Northwest Airlines flight carrying a home-made bomb, the report says.

Mr Obama has furiously denounced the "systemic" failures which allowed Nigerian Abdulmutallab, 23, to slip through the net.

There are also widespread reports that Mr Obama has ordered generals to draw up a list of targets for retaliatory air strikes on al-Qaeda camps in Yemen, where Abdulmutallab was given explosives training.

Mr Obama ordered two separate inquiries into the attempted attack on flight 253, the first of which he will be given today.

It has already emerged that CIA agents spoke directly to Abdulmutallab's father in Nigeria six weeks ago after he raised concerns about his son's "disappearance" to Yemen; that intelligence had been received about "a Nigerian" being readied in Yemen for a terrorist attack, and that intelligence agencies had heard that al-Qaeda was plotting a "Christmas surprise".

According to The Washington Post, the report will conclude that various agencies failed to pool information and "others were insufficiently aggressive in seeking out what was known about"Abdulmutallab, who is now in custody.

However a former intelligence official took issue with the findings.

"Information was shared. It was separating noise from chaff," the unnamed official told the Washington Post.

"It's not that information wasn't passed around, it's that so much information is being passed. There's an inherent problem of dealing with all the data that is sloshing around, and the practical matter of where you set your threshold."

Former CIA director Porter Goss said the blame lay with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is tasked with co-ordinating intelligence.

"Everything that happened on December 25 is exactly the stuff that's not supposed to happen anymore because of the new structure created with the DNI," he said.

Other officials suggested the problem lay with the National Counterterrorism Center, which tracks terrorist threats and gets "8,000 messages a day."

"We'd been tracking this stuff for months, without being able to connect the dots of what was happening and what was going to happen," CBS television quoted a high-ranking unnamed intelligence official as saying.

"We couldn't come up with something that was credible - so we assumed Al-Qaeda was still in the planning stages," he added.